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In the begi
“In short, it’s – one of those long stories that are very boring to begin, and it would be much better if we talked about other things, and still better if we were silent about other things.”
“All you want to do is be silent.”
“My friend, remember that to be silent is good, safe, and beautiful.”
“Beautiful?”
“Of course. Silence is always beautiful, and a silent person is always more beautiful than one who talks.”
These are dialogues of i
When The Adolescent started to appear in Notes of the Fatherland in 1875, it caused considerable amazement. The journal, under the influence of the critic N. K. Mikhailovsky, had become the organ of the populists, who abandoned the extreme rationalism and negation of the nihilists of the 1860s and preached a “going to the land” and the communal values of the Russian peasantry. The editor of the journal at that time was the poet and publicist Nikolai Nekrasov, an old acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s and his longtime ideological opponent. Dostoevsky’s devastating attack on the nihilists in Demons (1871– 72) had turned most of the radical intelligentsia against him. Though they may have had a lingering respect for him as the “prisoner of Omsk,” who had served a ten-year term of hard labor and exile for his own “antigovernment” activities, they hardly expected to find him in their company. On the other hand, the publication of The Adolescent in such an extreme-left journal brought accusations of betrayal and opportunism from Dostoevsky’s conservative friends, many of whom abandoned him. What explains this apparent switch of loyalties?
In April 1874, when Dostoevsky offered Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger, the plan for a new novel, Katkov turned it down. (Only later did Dostoevsky learn that Katkov already had a big novel coming in – Tolstoy’s A
In fact, Nekrasov even has a certain presence in The Adolescent. The figure of Makar Dolgoruky is based in part on the description of the old peasant wanderer in Nekrasov’s poem “Vlas,” as Dostoevsky signals by having Versilov quote a line from it when he first describes Makar to Arkady. Dostoevsky had written an admiring article on “Vlas” in 1873, a year before he began work on the novel. But there is another more hidden presence. Towards the end of the tribute he wrote in 1877 on the occasion of Nekrasov’s death, he speaks of a dark side to the poet’s life, which he foretold in one of his earliest poems. And he quotes three stanzas describing the young provincial’s arrival in the capital – “The lights of evening lighting up, / There was wind and soaking rain / . . . on my shoulders a wretched sheepskin, / In my pocket fifteen groats” – and ending:
No money, no rank, no family,
Short of stature and fu
Forty years have passed since then –
In my pocket I’ve got a million.
This was the adolescent poet’s dream of power. “Money,” Dostoevsky writes, “that was Nekrasov’s demon! . . . His was a thirst for a gloomy, sullen, segregated security with a view to dependence on no one.” This soul that sympathized with all of suffering Russia also had its “Rothschild idea” and its underground – the same “breadth” that Arkady Dolgoruky was alarmed to discover not only in Versilov but in himself.
But there was something besides Nekrasov’s invitation that drew Dostoevsky to Notes of the Fatherland. He was anxious not to lose touch with the younger generation, and saw that the shift in revolutionary ideology from nihilism to populism might allow for more i
The tonal range of this high and serious comedy is remarkably broad, bordering at times on tragedy and at other times on farce. Dostoevsky was able to place himself unerringly in the mind and even the unconscious of a green nineteen-year-old and maintain his voice consistently. Arkady’s leitmotif is the word “stupid” – the perfect adolescent word, repeated in countless variations: his fear of looking stupid, of saying something stupid, his judgments of the stupidity of other people, their stupid ideas, their stupid feelings, their stupid curtains. The play on “Dolgoruky” – the name of an ancient Russian princely family, while Arkady is not a prince but “simply Dolgoruky,” and illegitimate at that – runs through the whole novel, coming to a hilarious climax in the police station. At the begi